Japan desperately needs a competent organization that can stand up for the digital rights of its people now. They lack organizations like the EFF that are willing to do this.
In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended, so the system is a least working in some cases. The bigger problems here are web design and forms that impose specific characters in some fields.
> In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended
The rights of the photographer was respected from the very beginning. The attribution was still there for anyone to see. The “problem” was that it wasn’t included in the thumbnail, because it unsurprisingly didn’t fit in.
> so the system is a least working in some cases
No, this case represents a spectacular failure to protect people’s right to privacy and fair use. Why this is the case is already explained throughout this thread, so I don’t think we need to repeat this here.
Japan has no fair use, which is part of the problem here.
Usually people with their rights "infringed" by unauthorized posting on Twitter don't care. If they do care, the poster usually takes the image down. I guess that didn't happen in this case, which is why it went to court, but it rarely gets that far.
Politician Taro Yamada (his name is extremely generic but real) and manga artist Ken Akamatsu are copyright progressives and have managed to avert some of the worst proposed reforms, but I don't think there's any organization working on this.
That's hardly the point. Many virtualization systems do indeed use QEMU for device emulation, but they don't use it to emulate the entire CPU functionality itself. A key point about virtualization is that most code run native while privileged instructions are trapped and handled by the hypervisor, allowing multiple guest OSes to coexist. This gives guest OSes the illusion that it's in sole control of the hardware.
No judgement of not knowing but para-virtualization is not emulation and it is not a new or niche technology either. I think IBM was doing it in the 60s (might be off base with that factoid because modern-ish operating systems like the RC4000 weren't even a thing until the late 60s). It has simply been superseded by hardware assisted vt that allows for multiple "ring-0" guests.
There is a greater overhead and a limited scope when using paravirtualization. But that doesn't mean it is a relic, in fact you can try it right now in Virtualbox. I also believe that the Linux KVM has para-virtualization optimizations if the guest is Linux and the bare metal doesn't support hardware VT.
I'm confused, are you sure you've responded to the right comment? No one is talking about paravirtualization in this thread. As I take it, the parent comment was suggesting that Apple was faking virtualization with some kind of software trick in the demo, which isn't what paravirtualization is about.
Paravirtualization is a general optimization technique for VMs that allows the guest OS to better communicate its intent to the hypervisor through the use of hypercall APIs, sparing the guest OS from having to issue many series of privileged CPU instructions that each have to be trapped and handled by the hypervisor. It saves time because going back and forth between the hypervisor and the guest OS is an expensive operation, and reducing the number of times it happens helps a lot. It's not a simple replacement for hardware assisted virtualization or the other way around.
Perhaps I misunderstood. Here is the logic flow I followed:
(1) Apple has a virtualization framework that can "...boot and run a Linux-based operating system on an Apple silicon or Intel-based Mac computer."
(2) The virtualization framework for arm-based Macs will virtualize arm-Linux and x86-based macs would virtualize x86-linux. There maybe a semantic issue here if you believe that this api would also allow the "virtualization" of x86-linux on arm. That would not be considered virtualization to my best understanding of the definition.
(3) Looking at Apple's VZVirtualMachineConfiguration, VZVirtualMachine and "Virtualization Constants" there is nothing apparently exposing the underlying virtualization mechanism. So we don't know if Apple uses hardware (ring -1 in x86 parlance) or software virtualization (almost always para-virtualization) under the hood. Likely it uses both depending on the context.
(4) We know that Apple's current dev kit hardware (A12z) doesn't support hardware virtualization. Hardware virtualization is commonly referred to as the "Virtualization Host Extension" in arm64 parlance.
(5) We know that Apple demoed virtualization on arm with what appeared to be a arm64 ubuntu guest.
(6) Your original message said that you believed they weren't using an a12z for the demo, likely because its aforementioned lack of hardware virtualization.
(7) The comment below yours suggest that "One can certainly write software that virtualizes another machine". They were more than likely referring to para-virtualzation in their comment. I don't know any other blanket type of software virtualization.
(8) You responded saying you didn't know what software virtualization was, it is almost always para-virtualization. Para-virtualziation does not require a hardware hypervisor and predates all hardware virtualization technologies.
While there is full-hardware virtualization, it basically never a thing that happens anymore because of the rather large overhead. I don't know of any modern virtualization software that offers full software virtualization. Especially if your guest is Linux.
> (6) Your original message said that you believed they weren't using an a12z for the demo
I never claimed this
> (7) The comment below yours suggest that "One can certainly write software that virtualizes another machine". They were more than likely referring to para-virtualzation in their comment.
Well, yes and no. Virtualization (in the context of VMs) is about sharing the hardware between multiple OSes, so the statement about "virtualizing another machine" didn't even remotely make any sense. This led to my original comment, "emulation isn't virtualization."
And one small thing, it was the comment above mine, not below.
> (8) You responded saying you didn't know what software virtualization was, it is almost always para-virtualization.
Where can I find refereces to this term that supports this statement? I looked, and found the term "software virtualization" being used to refer to containerization and programming language runtimes, but not VMs.
You are correct about (6)! Apologies different user!
7/8 together. A Google scholar search of "software virtualization" or "software virtualization para virtualization" returned the following (plus many more) that refer to software virtualization in the same way I meant:
Finally I dopishly wrote "full hardware virtualization" when I meant "full virtualization", but for posterity here is VMware doc on it vs paravirtualzation vs hardware-assisted virtualzation:
https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...
Paravirtualization is relevant if the CPU does not support full virtualization - Xen was originally designed to use PV because it was very difficult to make x86 VMs fast because unmodified guest OSs required slow emulation. See section 2 of https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-xens...
You may be confusing the concept of hardware-assisted virtualization with full virtualization. Moreover, the famous Xen paper you've linked to never claimed that x86 didn't support full-virtualization because it did thanks to VMWare.
VMware didn't do full virtualization - it couldn't because x86 did not support it at that time! There were privileged instructions that did not cause a trap, and so which could not be virtualized using the normal trap-to-monitor technique. VMware used dynamic translation to JIT the guest kernel so that it did not execute privileged instructions, and so that it would run much faster than a simple emulator. This is explained in the Xen paper and also in https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu//~cs252/sp17/papers/vmware.pd...
> VMware [10] and Connectix [8] both virtualize commodity PC hardware, allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single host. All of these examples implement a full virtualization of (at least a subset of) the underlying hardware, rather than paravirtualizing and presenting a modified interface to the guest OS.
And no, I haven't forgotten about binary translation. As you mention, it was only used to replace privileged instructions and not a full-blown CPU emulator.
VMware VMs still ran native CPU instructions, and the overhead incurred by translation is a whole different matter unrelated to my original point.
If you look at the original post, it says "virtualization" in big bold letters. The precise definition of the term "VM" may perhaps be debatable, but I don't think it's fair to market your system as supporting Linux VMs, when in fact, you're emulating the CPU instead of virtualizing.
More importantly, I still haven't got the slightest idea what a "software VM" means, either. It's a term that I've never seen before. I even did an online search and found nothing.
Visit Wikipedia, in the search field type "virtual machine" but do not hit enter or search. Notice the text in the immediate results says "software that emulates an entire computer." Now, visit the page[1]: "...a virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a computer system." This says nothing about whether the virtualization is entirely software, assisted by hardware, or entirely hardware.
A "software virtual machine" is a disambiguation that I chose indicating that the "machine" is implemented entirely in software with no help from special silicon (contrast with [2]). I can't fathom why that would be so controversial.
The entire thread comes down to this: the demo of x86 Linux running on Apple Silicon could very easily have been running in a virtual machine made entirely of software. No one claimed, as I recall, that Silicon implemented any hardware assistance for executing x86 code. There might even be IP issues doing that (IP - intellectual property, not "internet protocol".)
> Visit Wikipedia, in the search field type "virtual machine" but do not hit enter or search.
Wikipedia is useful tool, but it's wrong to rely on it for preciseness or the as absolute source of truth, especially on highly technical topics.
> This says nothing about whether the virtualization is entirely software, assisted by hardware, or entirely hardware.
Again, what does this even mean? What's your specific example for an "entirely software" virtualization or "entirely hardware" virtualization?
> A "software virtual machine" is a disambiguation that I chose indicating that the "machine" is implemented entirely in software with no help from special silicon (contrast with [2]). I can't fathom why that would be so controversial.
You can't just invent a new term without any explanation and wonder why people wouldn't just "get it."
> The entire thread comes down to this: the demo of x86 Linux running on Apple Silicon could very easily have been running in a virtual machine made entirely of software
Are you sure of this? I was assuming it was ARM Linux.
> No one claimed, as I recall, that Silicon implemented any hardware assistance for executing x86 code.
No one claimed that you claimed such a thing either.
I looked into GNOME's gitlab discussions linked here and in the article, and I was appalled at GNOME maintainers' behavior on each and every one of them. Whenever app developers raise concerns that they don't have the adequate means to integrate with the GNOME desktop, GNOME maintainers consistently fault the developers and close the ticket without addressing the issue at all.
The worst part is that despite all this, a GNOME Foundation community manager even lied about the whole thing [1], claiming that MPV never even contacted GNOME before dropping support. He also talked about how the lack of cooperation was hurting the FOSS community [2], even though many app developers including MPV did in fact share their concerns on GNOME's gitlab issue tracker [3][4] and it was GNOME maintainers that chose to ignore them.
I've been using the GNOME for quite some time, but it's time for me to switch. Some applications didn't look quite right recently, and now I know the reason why.
But as for the idle inhibiting API, there is some (slow) progress in the form of two MRs. And they weren't closed outright, some code review took place instead:
Mozilla's arewefastyet.com used to show daily benchmark results for all major browser engines. Sadly, it ceased to include Safari after they scrapped the system in favor of a new one.
Scott encouraged people to raise objections in a civil way, and he really stressed that point. And yet both you and the article somehow accuse him of orchestrating a harassment campaign despite evidence to the contrary. Honest question, what else could he’ve done? Are you suggesting that he’s a villain for raising objections?
He was pointing to the appropriate channel for reporting such an issue. How else do you think people can signal objections? At least not by writing in their own diaries for sure.
He pointed to several channels including a twitter account, phone number and email. Are all of these channels equally appropriate ways to pursue civil discourse with the appropriate parties? Also, he only asked followers to be polite in parenthesis after this. Parenthesis are used for afterthoughts and explanations that deviate from the main topic. They also generally follow punctuation but the SSC blog post followed with the "be polite" bit after a paragraph break. For these reasons I do believe the "be polite" statement was disingenuous.
> He pointed to several channels including a twitter account, phone number and email. Are all of these channels equally appropriate ways to pursue civil discourse with the appropriate parties?
Um, yes? How does using any of these methods turn civil discourse into harassment?
> Also, he only asked followers to be polite in parenthesis after this
That's a real twist. He wouldn't want to sound like he assumes his readers are rude people, would he?
His suggestion wasn't civil and I already wrote why so I'm just going to quote the answer I already gave
> I don't think his words were polite, in fact I think it was quite the opposite. If I wanted a civil discussion I would not have listed any contact information about anyone. I would have said, "I am archiving the blog until further notice because I need to think about what kind of content should be made publicly available because words have power and it's important to think about what information and inferences we make available to others through those words".
The fact that he didn't do that means he did not have such intentions. There is now evidence for an actual harassment campaign against the journalists.
> If you have spoken with C_de M_tz, or if he has reached out to you, since the day that Scott took down Slate Star Codex: there may be something you can do to help
> Please feel free to reach out to me by DM and I can fill you in
The coded message is referring to the original journalist. I don't understand how people can look at all this evidence and still think the rationalist community isn't acting in bad faith when there is actual evidence on twitter of actual coordination among its members for a harassment campaign.
> There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS.
> (please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.)
Can you elaborate on what was un-civil about this? How is directly the users towards the feedback page of the New York Times and the editor in charge of the NYT technology section (the sub-group that Carl Metz belongs to), accompanied with explicit calls to be civil uncivil?
The notion that this is a harassment campaign is nothing less than laughable.
Even if the author's real name were used:
> Community message, pls share around as you like
> If you have spoken with Cade Metz, or if he has reached out to you, since the day that Scott took down Slate Star Codex: there may be something you can do to help
> Please feel free to reach out to me by DM and I can fill you in
How would this be considered harassment? This user is asking for people who have spoken to Cade Metz to get into contact. How is this evidence of harassment?
You seem to be inserting your own imagination that this tweet author is planning to release private contact information or something similar. When in reality this could easily be people sharing their experiences with Cade and whether similar situations of doxxing or de-anonymoization by the NYT authoer have occurred in the past.
Why is it laughable? I have already said several times what was uncivil about it. If I was a psychologist who read the comments of my posts I would have realize that subtle suggestions can be blown out of proportions and I would be very careful with what words I was using to express my intent.
A civil phrasing would have been, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved". That would have been civil. Asking anyone to act on your behalf by giving feedback to a 3rd party when it's obvious the intent is negative is not civil. It is sinister.
It's also becoming clear to me these conversations are no longer productive and I have started to re-iterate points I made in other posts. If you want to argue further make sure you understand what point I'm making and why and then make a good faith and pertinent point. Otherwise I will no longer engage with anyone responding to posts in this thread.
You can also email me if you want and make your points in a longer format. I will consider them and respond if you have well researched rebuttals.
> Why is it laughable? I have already said several times what was uncivil about it.
Perhaps this was the case, but you seem to have edited many parent comments in this chain with a '-'. Unless the flagging behavior has changed without my knowing. My understanding is that flagging removes the comment from users without showdead enabled, but does not edit the comment.
> If I was a psychologist who read the comments of my posts I would have realize that subtle suggestions can be blown out of proportions and I would be very careful with what words I was using to express my intent.
> A civil phrasing would have been, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved". That would have been civil. Asking anyone to act on your behalf by giving feedback to a 3rd party when it's obvious the intent is negative is not civil. It is sinister.
He explicitly tells people to be police, to not be a jerk, and to be mindful that they are representing the SSC community. How is this failing to express his intent that anyone commenting on his behalf to be civil? And how on Earth is it "obvious the intent is negative is not civil" when he explicitly tells any potential commenters to be civil?
Your suggestion that Scott instead write, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved" is not a rephrasing. It's a completely different message. He is not making this decision on his own volition, he was prompted to delete the blog due to the actions of another person. Your suggested phrasing not only completely omits this fact, but says the complete opposite.
> Your suggestion that Scott instead write, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved" is not a rephrasing. It's a completely different message. He is not making this decision on his own volition, he prompted to delete the blog due to the actions of another person. Your suggested phrasing not only completely omits this fact, but says the complete opposite.
If your argument is that he had no choice in the matter then I'm not really arguing with you because in my world people can make choices of their own free will. To assume otherwise is a slippery slope and so I'm not interested in making that argument. If you have compelling evidence that Scott had no choice in deleting his blog then present it and we can argue about it.
Actions have consequences. The kind of community SSC fostered was not able to stand up to scrutiny even though its members pride themselves on reasoned and rational argumentation and scrutiny. When push came to shove they did not uphold and stand up for their own principles, instead they adopted the same tactics that their detractors use (innuendo and vague insinuations of great moral crimes) to defend themselves. You can look at the Twitter threads where people actually "doxxed" the journalist and his interactions and as the kids say "dragged" him on Twitter. It was all very ugly. No sane person would want to associate themselves with that kind of behavior.
I have no opinions on the editors or journalists at NYT or any other news publication. I have no reason to believe they're the enemy and yet SSC and its members seem to think so. I find such opinions and the people that hold them confused and irrational (the opposite of certain, reasoned, and rational).
> If your argument is that he had no choice in the matter then I'm not really arguing with you because in my world people can make choices of their own free will. To assume otherwise is a slippery slope and so I'm not interested in making that argument. If you have compelling evidence that Scott had no choice in deleting his blog then present it and we can argue about it.
You're using the words "choice" and "voluntary" in a very pedantic way.
If someone puts a knife to your throat and demands the contents of your wallet under threat of being killed, you're also handing over the contents of your wallet out of your own free will. You chose to give up your property. You could have chosen to refuse and suffer the consequences. Your decision to give up your property was voluntary, in the sense that you could have chosen otherwise. This isn't technically wrong, but it also isn't what how the overwhelming majority of people use the word "voluntary".
When people talk about being forced to do something, they're talking about being pressured into taking a certain action due to the necessity of avoiding some consequence if they don't. In this case, Scott was being threatened with the consequence of having his identity revealed to a much broader audience with the probably consequence of adversely affecting his career and his patients. Yes, he chose to delete his blog. He could have left it up and lived with the adverse consequences to his livelihood. But this decision was made due to the threat of these consequences - it was not voluntary.
> Here is an actual trail of evidence for one of the members of the tech community actively harassing a reporter
This person isn't talking about either Cade Metz (the New York Times journalist that was writing about SSC), nor Pui-Wing Tam. The mention of Slate Star Codex comes at the end of this thread. How does this connect, in any way, to Scott's blog post? Furthermore, do you realize how absurd it is to form an opinion of an entire community of thousands if not tens of thousands of people based on the actions of a single person?
Furthermore, how is this harassment? This person is criticizing a journalist on false claims, and calling them a sociopath. You seem to be under the impression that the simple act of saying unfavorable things about someone is harassment. It isn't. If calling someone a liar and a sociopath is harassment, then a lot of people harassing a certain national leader on a regular basis (and rightly so, IMO. The point is to demonstrate that calling someone a liar and a sociopath isn't harassment).
What point are you making? That my definition of voluntary is incorrect? If so then I disagree because I use the word exactly how I mean it. No one put a knife to anyone's throat and forced them to do anything that they could have avoided if they had taken precautions. In Scott's case, he could have fostered a better community of individuals and been more careful about his anonymity but he didn't and he wasn't. So his problems spilled over into the larger tech community and people adopted the attitude of the free press being "anti-technology" and "evil".
Calling someone a sociopath is indeed harassment if you have no compelling evidence to prove your point. Because if you claim someone is a sociopath without providing compelling evidence then you're arguing in bad faith which is a characteristic of sociopathic people.
I don't know who Taylor is but I can tell that she's not a sociopath but the person harassing her on the other hand has certain sociopathic characteristics.
The author of the tweet pointed out that lied, and subsequently attacked others while playing the victim - which are sociopathic tendencies. If what he says it true, he could reasonably claim to have compelling evidence to prove his point.
But this is irrelevant. Calling someone a sociopath regardless of whether or not you have evidence isn't harassment. You realize that harassment is a crime, right? It's honestly quite astounding that you believe restrictions on speech are this tight. Being offended or insulted does not make speech harassment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that banning speech on the basis of offensiveness is not allowed [1]. Speech protections go even further than that - even burning a cross and calling for "revengeance" against minorities is protected [2]. No, Balaji's Tweets aren't harassment. They aren't even near it.
Harassment laws almost always revolve around non-consensual speech (e.g. someone following you or otherwise forcing you to be exposed to their speech), or a captive audience (a boss saying something to an employee. The employee is a captive audience, they can't avoid their boss without losing their job). Harassment is about keeping people from having to listen to speech that they do not consent to receiving. Harassment laws are not about preventing people from saying offensive things about other people. Taylor isn't a captive audience - if she does not consent to seeing Balaji's Tweets she can easily block him.
And on a side note: using your own expansive definition of harassment, aren't you now harassing Balaji by calling him a sociopath or saying he has "sociopathic tendencies"? If not why is it okay for your to call someone a sociopath, but harassment for him to call Taylor a sociopath?
> But this is irrelevant. Calling someone a sociopath regardless of whether or not you have evidence isn't harassment. You realize that harassment is a crime, right? It's honestly quite astounding that you believe restrictions on speech are this tight.
I have never argued for any restrictions on free speech and yet you continue to say that I have. Why is this confusing for you? I have continued to present evidence for why I think what I think and yet all I hear back is my definitions are wrong and pedantic. What in your opinion is not pedantic and correct? Can you provide the definitions so we can have a fruitful argument instead of going around in circles about what words means and how they can be associated with actions that can cause harm.
I also never called anyone a sociopath. I presented evidence for what I consider to be harassment and sociopathic actions. Here is my exact quote
> Calling someone a sociopath is indeed harassment if you have no compelling evidence to prove your point. Because if you claim someone is a sociopath without providing compelling evidence then you're arguing in bad faith which is a characteristic of sociopathic people.
I don't know who Balaji is or what he does. I'm just inferring his characteristics from his obsession with Taylor and his constant combative language about the free press and journalists (specifically targeting Taylor with his tweets and calls to action to harass her along with calling her a sociopath without compelling evidence). Balaji is using exactly the same tactics Trump uses to discredit his detractors.
I will again re-iterate what I said. This is getting tiresome. If you have an actual argument against anything that I have said then my email is in my profile. I will no longer respond to more replies to my posts in this thread.
> I have never argued for any restrictions on free speech and yet you continue to say that I have. Why is this confusing for you?
You have repeatedly said that Balaji's actions are harassment. Again, harassment is illegal. Why is this confusing for you? When you say that somebody is harassing someone, you're saying that their actions are illegal and it's the government's responsibility to put a stop to it. For the third time harassment is illegal.
Do you believe Balaji's Tweet are illegal? If not then you agree with me: he is not harassing people. Is he being a jackass? Sure. Is this harassment? No.
> I'm just inferring his characteristics from his obsession with Taylor and his constant combative language about free press and journalists.
Right. And Balaji is inferring Taylor's status as a sociopath given her actions. But apparently this isn't harassment when you do it, but it is harassment when other people do the same.
> Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates or embarrasses a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and moral reasonableness. In the legal sense, these are behaviors that appear to be disturbing, upsetting or threatening. They evolve from discriminatory grounds, and have an effect of nullifying or impairing a person from benefiting their rights. When these behaviors become repetitive, they are defined as bullying. The continuity or repetitiveness and the aspect of distressing, alarming or threatening may distinguish it from insult.
That's the definition of harassment from wikipedia and it characterizes the actions from many people in the tech community. I showed an example of such from Balaji against Taylor. In fact, he goes further into bullying territory because his actions are repetitive and consistently of sinister nature of painting the free press in broad and negative brushstrokes. He's not just bullying and harassing a specific member of the free press but he does so more generally and demeans the entire profession. That's what I call harassment. I don't care about legality. I care about decent behavior. And Balaji is not acting as a decent person so I'm using his actions as evidence of what I mean by harassment and indecent.
Again, the fact that someone calling out a journalist for publishing falsehoods and calling them a sociopath for doing so (lying is a sociopathic tendency) is harassment in your eyes is astounding. It's good that we cleared up that you aren't referring to actual harassment here - only your alternative definition of harassment - but it's still surprising to see just easily people are throwing that term around. The next time I hear someone talk about experiencing harassment in their field I need to be mindful that there's a good chance that the're using the term harassment in the same vein as you.
And again, you've still neglected to establish any sort of link between Baiaji and Scott's post. Baiaji didn't even mention Metz or the editor of the technology section. He didn't post about the New York Times' threat to dox Scott until after he posted about Taylor. So establishing any sort of causal link bewteen Scott's post and Baiaji's behavior.
To top it all off, I can't help but appreciate the fact that you're replicating the same behavior for which you are criticizing Baiaji here:
> In fact, he goes further into bullying territory because his actions are repetitive and consistently of sinister nature of painting the free press in broad and negative brushstrokes. He's not just bullying and harassing a specific member of the free press but he does so more generally and demeans the entire profession.
Yet in your post you characterize many people in the tech industry as harassers:
> That's the definition of harassment from wikipedia and it characterizes the actions from many people in the tech community.
So it's bullying when Baiaji paints a group of people in broad and negative brushstrokes. Yet you feel it's appropriate to write that the definition of harassment characterizes the actions of many people in tech.
Are you done mis-characterizating everything I say? If not, please quote everything else I've said and characterize them however you want so I can point to actual examples of how you willfully keep mis-interpreting whatever I'm saying.
I've repeatedly told you to write an argument in a longer format if you have any actual points to make but you continue responding to the thread even when I've repeatedly said I'm no longer interested in this discussion because it is tiresome to go around in circles.
There's nothing I'd put in an email that I can't put in a comment here. The only reason why you'd want me to respond via email is so that your responses wouldn't be public for other people to see. If you want a longer format, I'm willing to break this whole conversation down step by step.
* Originally you claimed that Scott was being uncivil by directing people to share their feedback on the situation with the New York Times designated feedback contact. Despite the fact that the explicitly directed potential commenters to be civil.
* I asked how this could possibly be uncivil when Scott explicitly tells commenters to be civil, to which you responded that you "have already said several times what was uncivil about it" (you haven't, or maybe it was in the posts that you edited to '-'). You also linked to this twitter post [1] as "actual evidence on twitter of actual coordination among its members for a harassment campaign" despite there being nothing at all indicating the existence of a harassment campaign.
* You then wrote that a civil phrasing would have been for Scott to say that his deletion of the blog was voluntary. I point out that this isn't a rephrasing of the original message, it's a completely different message and one that doesn't capture the fact that the deletion of the blog wasn't voluntary.
* You then claim that it was voluntary, because Scott could have just lived with the negative consequences of leaving it up. I then point out that doing something out of fear of consequences is what it means for something to be involuntary. You also then link to this twitter post [2] as evidence of "one of the members of the tech community actively harassing a reporter". But this tweet doesn't even mention Cade Metz or Pui-Wing Tam. And it doesn't even mention Scott until after the supposedly harassing tweets are made.
How is explicitly telling a community to be civil indicative of incivility? Nothing in your first twitter link even so much as mentions harassment yet you claim it's "actual evidence on twitter of actual coordination among its members for a harassment campaign". How do you convince yourself that taking action under the threat of doxxing and negative impact on your career and patients is voluntary? How is Balaji's tweets supposed to support the claim that Scott is being uncivil - especially when he only mentions Scott after the "harassing" tweets?
Each of your comments gets further from the original claim, and more and more outlandish.
> The only reason why you'd want me to respond via email is so that your responses wouldn't be public for other people to see. If you want a longer format, I'm willing to break this whole conversation down step by step.
I have no fear of public scrutiny. My actions have clearly demonstrated that because I have engaged everyone that has contacted me in good faith but I have not received the same treatment so I'm getting tired of re-iterating my points. If you think it's a trick then you can contact me on keybase and I will happily sign any statement that you want attributed to me and that I think is a fair assessment. If you don't think cryptographic proof is sufficient then we have nothing to argue about.
I stand by all my original claims. If you have specific arguments then quote me, and state your argument. I'm not looking for out of context quotes and mis-characterizations. If you want to continue arguing then provide actual quotes, state what you think I said and why, and make a counter-point for why you think my claim is incorrect with compelling evidence. You can contact me on keybase and cross-post our conversation on whatever public forum you want.
> I would have said, "I am archiving the blog until further notice because I need to think about what kind of content should be made publicly available because words have power and it's important to think about what information and inferences we make available to others through those words".
That's not a way him to raise objections. You're demanding that he shut up.
> His suggestion wasn't civil
The fact that you keep repeating this doesn't make any of this true. He didn't make any suggestions to harass anyone.
> I don't understand how people can look at all this evidence
Your "evidence" is unrelated to Scott himself, and it doesn't show any sort of harassment taking place either.
I did not [demand] that anyone do anything. I stated an opinion and backed it up with reasoning about why I believed what I believed. It's silly to jump from what I actually said to what you inferred.
> You're demanding that he shut up.
I did not demand anything. I gave reasons and arguments about what I thought. He silenced himself by deleting his blog, no one demanded that he do so, he took the action of deleting his blog of his own volition.
But you repeatedly criticized him for voicing his objections to being de-anonymized. When asked how he could’ve done so differently, you said that he should’ve wrote about how terrible his blog posts were instead. How is this different from demanding that he shut up?
> It's silly to jump from what I actually said to what you inferred.
That’s an explanation of what you’ve been doing all along with the whole “making suggestions” nonsense.
Is criticism no longer allowed? Isn't that the foundation of rational debate?
I have no opinions on his anonymity. I personally don't care or want to know who he is and wasn't planning on reading the NYT article. I have my own conclusions about SSC and its community that I doubt would be changed by the article and no one here has yet convinced me otherwise or given any compelling evidence to the contrary.
I have explained why I used the words that I did. If you have any more points to make then quote me in context and provide an actual rebuttal instead of calling what I wrote "nonsense".
Suppose I have a big following. Suppose I know that some of those followers are prone to exaggerating some things that I "suggest". If you know those two facts, would you have written the same letter?
I'm not saying your interpretation is incorrect. I'm saying, knowing what I know about SSC, I know that certain people would interpret his letter differently and cause problems for the editor and the original jouranlist and that seems to be exactly what happened. A vocal minority took up his cause and shaped the discourse around him being a victim and the editor and journalist being evil.
Even in this thread, any kind of actual discussion is almost impossible. The general opinion is very skewed by very specific interpretations of Scott's persona.
> Suppose I have a big following. Suppose I know that some of those followers are prone to exaggerating some things that I "suggest". If you know those two facts, would you have written the same letter?
By your standards, any form of activism is a harassment campaign unless you can control the actions of every single individual in your group. I see this line of argument a lot recently, but frankly it’s nonsense.
> Even in this thread, any kind of actual discussion is almost impossible. The general opinion is very skewed by very specific interpretations of Scott's persona (which I don't think is actually valid because in my opinion he was not a benevolent person).
We’re talking about non-debatable facts here. You keep saying that the blog take down post “suggested” people to harass NYT. That post is there in plain view, and it clearly does not.
Yeah, that's how the left operates now. There are no facts, the only truth is they only operate in good faith and their opponents only operate in bad faith. Therefore anything they say or do is just and anything their opponents say or do is evil.
Peaceful marches become nazi rallies while arsonist riots are stirring protests. Scott Alexander is nice to the point of stupidity, but he is the enemy therefore his actions are inherently nefarious, while the nyt - who recently accused Noam Chomsky and a black academic of white supremacy - become saints harassed by evil incels.
A hacker news thread about it spends god knows how long arguing about the definition of ad hominem, and even though the leftist is just plain fundamentally incorrect they refuse to back down and accuse others of bad faith for not buying their fantasy definition.
What you argue for matters as much as how you do it. I don't see anything wrong with criticizing people who advocate for racism. Peaceful marches for racism doesn't make racism just, you know.
I don't see any problem with criticising racism either, I just object to the attempts to paint them as violent while in the next breath pretending the Floyd riots were peaceful.
That wouldn't solve the root of the problem, though. The real solution would be to use other distros.
Besides, there are quality concerns with browser forks maintained by an understaffed project. The fact that ungoogled-chromium asks for internet randos to provide its own binary releases doesn't inspire confidence either. If someone desperately needs to use Ubuntu, they'd be better off using Firefox.
Even if you ignore the problem of self-modifying code, a completely static translation of x86 binaries is impossible. Things get hard real quick when indirect branches are involved, so you have to rely on a runtime solution when ahead of time solutions won’t work.
Taking an "I was just following orders" sort of stance doesn't really mean you're apolitical, and this is the point. It doesn't really matter that you have a "neutral" stance against, say, producing spyware, the fact that you actually do tells the whole story.
